How do I use Google's Cache to Restore a Web Page?

If you need to have a website page restored and you have no local backup, you may be able to use Google's cache as an alternative. When Google crawls your website, it takes a snapshot of your page. The snapshot shows what your page looked like when your page was crawled, and can be accessed through the "Cached" link in Google's search results. Restoring a page using Google's cache is using the html Google saved when crawling your site to rebuild the file you need restored.

Steps to restore your a web page from Google's cache

In this example, we'll show you how you could restore your public_html/index.html file

Search google for cache:YourDomain.com/index.html. Be sure not to have any spaces between cache: and YourDomain.com/index.html

At the top of the page, Google will display a message similar to:

This is Google's cache of http://www.domain.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Dec 14, 2009 22:29:21 GMT.

The snapshot date listed is the date that Google crawled your site. If your page shows correctly below this message, then you should be able to use the html code in Google's cache to attempt to restore the file.

View the source code of the page. In most browsers you can right-click and choose View Page Source.

While viewing the source code, you can copy and paste the code onto your own website page. Before copying and pasting it, it is recommended to copy the coding into a blank html page and saving it to see how it will look in your browser. Be sure to remove the top 3 - 4 lines as it is additional code added by Google. If the version of your page in Google's cache will work for you, then you can move the file onto your server and re-name it to the file that it is replacing.

Note that this is not guaranteed to work or show the page as you want it to be displayed, so only use these steps as a last resort to restore your web page.

The article is too difficult or too technical to follow.
There is a step or detail missing from the instructions.
The information is incorrect or out-of-date.
It does not resolve the question/problem I have.

How did you find this article?

Please tell us how we can improve this article:

Email Address

Name

new! - Enter your name and email address above and we will post your feedback in the comments on this page!